TALK about dry. Have you ever thought that reading biomedical journals is like 鈥渁 long journey through a colourless, flat terrain devoid of prominent features鈥�?
That鈥檚 the conclusion of a linguistic study by Raul Rodriguez-Esteban of Columbia University in New York and Andrey Rzhetsky at the University of Chicago. They compared the occurrence of sensory words 鈥� such as those for colours and textures 鈥� in 78 journals with language used by Reuters news service, Wikipedia, Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman.
Whitman and Reuters came top, while the journals only managed about one-fifth of their score (The EMBO Journal, ).
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Rzhetsky says using more sensory words would make biomedical papers easier to understand. Peter Griffiths of the Plain English Campaign agrees: 鈥淚f you get the senses involved, it tends to make things much clearer.鈥�
鈥淯sing more sensory words would make biomedical papers easier to understand鈥�
However, Athar Yawar, a senior editor at The Lancet, thinks that any change would require a rethink of scientific method to incorporate sensory experience as well as its usual abstract concepts.